3 Ways IT Managers Can Become More Productive

Time, time, time. If only we all had more of it! As an IT manager the day can get away from us early on and we’ll never have a chance to get it back. None of us have the IT manager skills that are needed to prevent this from happening. What we really need are some tips on how we can get more time during the day so that we can get more done. It turns out that there are ways that we can reclaim our day, we just need to know how to go looking for them.

Start The Day With More Energy

I am a firm believer that how your day starts off is a good indicator about how the day is going to turn out. All too often I believe that when we roll out of bed in the morning we start the day out feeling tired and it never get any better for us.

What we need is a way to start the day off on the right foot. Sorry, this is not the kind of thing that gets covered in IT manager training. It turns out that for many of us the reason that our day is starting off on a low note is because when we get up we have low blood sugar. The good news about this is that there is something that you can do about it.

In order to prevent yourself from starting the day off feeling tired and worn down, you need to take steps before you go to bed to prevent this from happening. Before you call it a day, take a tablespoon or two of unsweetened almond butter. By doing this you’ll stabilize your blood sugar and you’ll be able to start the next day off on the right foot.

Double Your Reading Speed

Even in this audio / video age in which we are currently living, the written word is how a lot of information get communicated to us. This means that we spend a big part of everyday reading. If only there was a good way for us to speed that process up.

It turns out that there is. The secret to becoming a faster reader is to have a better understanding of how your eyes work. What you need to realize is that you actually have very good peripheral vision and you’ve not been using it when you’ve been reading.

In order to boost your reading time, start to read sentences about three words in from the left hand margin. and stop reading when you get within three words of the end of the line. Your peripheral vision will take care of reading the edges and you’ll discover your reading speed increasing dramatically.

Actually Clean Out Your Email Inbox

If there is one thing that I just can’t stand it’s when my email inbox become unmanageable. This seems to be a problem that IT managers just can’t overcome. In order to deal with this problem, you need to find a way to convince people to send you fewer emails.

One of the clever tools that I’ve discovered is called the three line response. Limit all of your email responses to no more than three lines in length. This may come across as curt or brief to some people that you communicate with, but it will free up your time and people will quickly stop expecting long wordy responses from you.

What All Of This Means For You

You said that you wanted to have more time. Now that I’ve told you how you can make this happen, are you brave enough to give my suggestions a try? If you really want to have more time, then you will.

Every day starts off either good or bad. You can make it start better by taking action the night before. Reading is something that we all do all day. If you follow my tip then you’ll be able to get your reading done faster and get on to other things. Finally, here in the 21st Century we still communicate by email every day. Use my tip to clean out your inbox and you’ll be on top of your email instead of buried underneath it.

We will probably never have enough time to get everything that we need to get done, done. Add in the time that IT team building takes and we can get even farther behind. However, by following these three simple tips we can end up with more time than we have today. The question that you need to be asking yourself now is what will I do with all of this extra time?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Having an IT team report to you is a great complement – the company believes that you can lead them to success. However, in order to get your team to accomplish the things that you want them to do, you are going to have to first motivate them to take action. This motivation thing can be tricky, who among us really knows how to go about doing it? Looks like this is one more of the IT manager skills that we all need to master.